She Hung the Moon...: Ringing in a New Year

I have never been a big fan of New Year's Eve. Actually, I am lucky if I even make it until midnight! Over the past so many years, we have made our own little tradition of staying in, having a few drinks and making crab legs and an array of appetizers which always include shrimp cocktail. Then we watch movies and hang out with the kids. It is nice, and relaxing and safe. I imagine as the kids get older maybe we will add games, you know, once they can play. We are WILD I tell you!

This year, I tried to get creative and do something crafty since the kids are getting bigger and actually get the concept of New Year's. Well at least Paige does. Something that the kids would remember doing and maybe start a new tradition with it. So...I hopped on Pinterest looking for ideas. I didn't find anything that I could easily do with out alot of effort or a trip to the craft store so I decided to blow up a whole bunch of balloons, one color for each child and 12 balloons each. I then wrote a message on little pieces of paper and rolled them up, inserting them into each balloon before blowing them up. Each message was the same for every 15 minute interval leading up to the new year.

So for example...Paige had red and Quinn had yellow. There was one balloon of each color that had a note in it that said "Let's make popcorn!" and on the outside of that balloon I wrote the time of 7:30 in large numbers with a Sharpie. They watched the clock and at 7:30, they got to find their color coded balloons and pop them to find their message! This went on every 15 minutes for 3 hours with the "Kid's New Year" beginning at 10:00 PM. It was fun! And kept us all entertained.

My idea originally was to just let the balloon's roll around the living room but my husband being the giant man child that he is had to one up me. He used static to stick all of the balloons to the ceiling. I was certain that this idea would not work, but he proved me wrong and it made for a fun little twist to the game. The kids had a blast trying to figure out how they were going to get their balloons down. I think that part was more fun than the popping and message retrieval was! I took a bunch of pictures and we laughed so hard at the kids, they look so funny flying though the air. It turned out to be the best New Years we have had in a long time, making memories, in our home, as a family.

Their favorite way to pop the balloons was to sit on them and bounce until they exploded!!

One of the notes instructed them to hug each other. Quinn was willing, Paige would have rather poked herself in the eye. Eventually we coaxed her into it.